What Universe, Indeed

It's like those studies you read about in your psychology survey classes in college. Rats pressing levers for food pellets, pigeons learning how to walk a tightrope, and Congressional Republicans and right-wing media blowhards carrying on about how much Democrats hate the military. This is behaviorism on display - a Democrat in the White House = America-hating anti-military radical.

Now, it should be obvious to anyone with brain cells that a four percent increase in spending, in an economic atmosphere of deflation, is hardly a cut in spending. Which is why the Republican reaction to the proposed DoD budget is evidence that, in fact, the Republicans have no brain cells. Watch Jon Stewart break it down.

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What has Sec. Gates proposed? Cutting overpriced, unnecessary weapons systems (although surely not all that could receive this ax) like the 1980's-era F-22 fighter jet (there are 187 of the planes in service, none of which have seen combat yet), and something called the "airborne laser" which should never have gone beyond the manuscript phase of a bad science fiction book. Joe Lieberman's crocodile tears about that system getting chopped is parody. I don't even think Newt - who fancies himself a forward thinker, but is in fact almost clinically detached from reality - could have pleaded for such a nonsensical piece of garbage better. A "laser plane" that can shoot down ballistic missiles? It seems to me, just sitting here in my little study, that we might need to get those planes somewhere near launch sites pretty fast, and there are such things as SAMs (surface-to-air missiles), enemy fighters, and the whole it's-a-long-way-to-Tipperary factor. But, who cares about things like the simple fact we might need to know a few hours in advance that a ballistic missile launch is pending in order to get the planes in place, plus make sure we get more than we actually need in the air so that if any are lost to hostile fire we can still keep those missiles from getting past "boost phase" - if the whole "laser" works (I suspect the whole program was sold using Star Trek reruns, including sound-effects).

I do like the fact that Obama keeps himself above this kind of thing, for the most part, only engaging when things get out of hand, and only so far as to remind people that he, the President, is an adult, and leader of a nation made up, for the most part, of adults. The only non-adults, it seems, are the right-wing folks who think that increasing spending is somehow, in some way, a cut in spending.